Back in the 1960s and 1970s a new style of cooking emerged in France, known as “nouvelle cuisine.” Some chefs who specialized in these creative, imaginative renditions of food became celebrities. Luke Barr recently published “The Secret History of French Cooking — the Outlaw Chefs Who Made Food Modern.”
I spoke to the author on my radio program, where he declared “nobody even remembers nouvelle cuisine.” Even so, that style of cooking changed the way many gourmet restaurants operate and it altered how we think about the food that is served in these establishments.
Barr studied the people who developed this style of cuisine in France and the dishes they created. As he was doing his research he discovered these chefs were all men. During the 1960s, this was a closed off world and almost impossible for women to enter. The undisputed leader of these chefs was a man named Paul Bocuse.
Bocuse was a brilliant cook. He was also a shameless self-promoter and a publicity hound. While Bocuse was dismissive of women who cooked he was not averse to having a woman working to obtain publicity for him and his restaurant. We learn how a woman named Yanou Collart became a super publicist for the circle of chefs who were specializing in nouvelle cuisine.
Discrimination against women by chauvinists like Bocuse helped the author discover another fascinating movement from that same period; a group of women chefs bonded together to form an organization in France that promoted their restaurants and their styles of cooking, which tended to be more traditional than nouvelle cuisine.
In nouvelle cuisine chefs employed new methods of cooking and presentation. Bocuse became renowned for green beans that were hardly cooked. A pair of brothers came up with a salmon recipe in which it was cut in long thin slices, quickly heated, then served on top of the sauce instead of beneath it.
This is also the story of food critics who championed this new style of cooking as well as those who dismissed it or objected to it. One notable critic, the most famous in France, despised nouvelle cuisine and became a champion of the more traditional cooking that women were serving in their restaurants.
It got complicated. This critic, Robert Courtine, had a dark past. When France was occupied by the Germans during WWII he was a virulent anti-Semite; after the war his history as a Nazi collaborator got swept aside. Some of the feminist female chefs he extolled were not thrilled by his advocacy.
Eventually the nouvelle cuisine movement spread to the United States and elsewhere. One chef came up with a highly successful low calorie variation on the style, and he even made frozen foods taste better. Barr shows how the nouvelle cuisine movement eventually fell apart. It made an enduring impression, though, opening the minds of consumers and giving them permission to savor new culinary experiences.
Vick Mickunas of Yellow Springs interviews authors at 7 a.m. Saturdays and 10:30 a.m. Sundays on WYSO-FM (91.3). For more information, visit wyso.org. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com.
Dining and Cooking